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The Connected Home's Battle of the Bulbs
redletterdave writes: "The current leader in smart lights is Philips Hue Wi-Fi-enabled bulbs. But the competition just heated up last week, with both LG and Samsung unveiling new smart bulbs. Not that Philips is sitting idly by—the boss of intelligent bulbs also unveiled two new products: the Hue Lux LED bulb, a cheaper, stripped-down version of its pricey original, and the Philips Hue Tap, an add-on that lets you trigger lights by touch. But which company will win the battle to illuminate the connected home?"
...an app for that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There was some way to have a remote... Say attached to the wall, which would allow you to 'touch' it to have the lights turn on and off, or even possibly dim. One can dream..
Now do they really think "They're lazy! Instead of not reading the article, they will just sit back and listen. No-more bad comments, problem solved" They underestimate our power. Begin the rants!
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
Honestly, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Why would the average person want or even need to control each bulb in their house individually? Also, won't this make each bulb very expensive, and as others have pointed out, more of a security problem? I just want lighting that's inexpensive and efficient, and I think I represent the majority in this case. You want to remotely control your lighting? There are already products and systems to do that, you don't need the bulbs themselves to do it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Oh wait! Maybe you could clap your hands and the smart lights would turn on/off! Yeah, that's it. Now off to patent my invention. Buhahahahah!
Billions of electronic bits gave their lives to produce this article. It's sad really since we'll never see their likes again.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The original Hue was nice, because as the name implied you could change the bulb to be any color.
Or at least, as nice as the need to have bulbs of different colors. I never found that need pressing so I didn't ever get one.
If one was single I could see possibly using them for mood lighting for "guests".
The ability to control bulbs individually does have some practical use though - you could simulate being home when away by running a program that would turn on bulbs in different rooms in different times.
Or, if you think you have burglars, turn on all the lights in the house at once to try and scare them off.
Or better yet (back to color) you could color the lights red and strobe them while sounding an emergency siren... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you shut off a lamp manually, Hue may not know what state the light is in. Turn it off with the Tap, and it knows the lights are off.
They've replicated the one-way communication of X10, then. That seems rather lame.
Meanwhile, Cree's nice LED replacements for 60W incandescent bulbs are now below $10 at Home Depot. 10 year warranty. They draw 9 watts. Dimmable with existing external dimmers. Just buy a case of those and replace anything that burns out with one.
But which company will win the battle to illuminate the connected home?"
They all will lose as competing standards will decrease adoption. In the end there will probably be a standard that is not backward compatible and early adopters will have to buy new equipment. Maybe all companies win after all.
Now if we could do this for more components in our house.
I put a timer switch on a closet light my wife and I tend to forget to turn off. Automatically shuts off after 5 minutes as it is just a pantry/storage closet. I've got another spot with motion sensors. I have to turn the lights on but then a motion sensor turns them off if there is no motion in the room for X number of minutes. Good for locations like kitchens.
Even worst: the damn thing auto-plays so you can't open a bunch of tabs at once and they're making me download something I'm not going to use.
Waste of bandwidth is what it is. Let's hope it's part of the stupid april first pranks. Then again it appears that beta is real, so who knows.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
But the job of the socket or outlet? I'd prefer to see some sort of USB/bluetooth-esque standard where the plugged-in device, be it a bulb in a socket, a lamp in a wall outlet, or a toaster oven could all be monitored and controlled through the same interface. A device would not even have to comply to the standard for this to be useful. We'd already be able to tell if it is on or off, and chart out power consumption. Devices in compliance could extend the functionality in the same way any number of USB devices could be controlled via the PC, so long as they have the right driver.
I'm loving the new audio. If you don't understand why it is here, or how long it will last - well that's your problem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ability to turn off light remotely, and have it stay off!!!!
With this feature I'll buy a $50 lightbulb, without out it - I'm not buying.
Why? Because as any parent knows. As soon as you put your kid to bed, the first thing they do is wait to hear your steps depart, get up, and turn on their light. Above functionality would allow parents to turn off the light. And keep it off for set time.
Presently, all these smart bulbs have a bunch of features, but if you turn them on at the switch...they come on. We need a feature to prevent that for parents the world over.
Sadly, most of these smart bulbs have failed (despite all their whiz bang feature set) to offer a solution to the problem.
PROBLEM: You put your child to bed, and as soon as you leave they turn the light back on.
SOLUTION: Offer a smart bulb I can turn off or disable remotely, even better yet, set a timer.
PROBLEM: Most of these smart bulbs come on when you turn on the switch. That's the exact opposite of what I want. I want the bulb to be de-activated from when I set it to say 7am. So that my kids cannot turn it back on.
1. Right click on player ;-)
2. Add AdBlock audio filter to slashdot.org domain
3. Problem solved!
So now I've got a bulb that when i turn it off at the switch it stops drawing electricity, they want lightbulbs all over my house that are not off but in "standby" mode. Sucking on power throughout the day...
I remember when lightbulbs were not $15 but $.50.
HUE bulbs are 30 watt equivalent brightness. they need to get to the 60 watt world before they are useable.
Also they are ungodly expensive for what they are, and from a friends failure rate, I know why, you are paying for a warranty that will be used. he is having a 30% failure rate on the bulbs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is 60 watts the new 100 watts or something? 60 is too dim. Is anyone making 100 watt equivalents or is bright light now a victim of the green movement?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I like the Cree bulbs. I just wish they (or any other) were as good as the Philips L-Prize bulbs (93 CRI and 93 Lumens/W)
For comparison:
Cree TW series: 93CRI and 59 Lumens/W
Cree regular: 80CRI and 84 Lumens/W
Philips: 81CRI and 72 Lumens/W
Hue bulbs speak ZigBee, not Wi-Fi. Communication between the bridge and the lights is done with a mix of the ZigBee Home Automation and ZigBee Light Link application profiles on a ZigBee PRO mesh network using an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer. The bridge is an IP-to-ZigBee gateway, but there's no direct IP connectively to the bulbs.
I just loaded a half dozen /. stories in tabs, and now as many computer voices are reading submission summaries to me in some godawful cacophony.
What the hell?
Worse than beta, since there's no off switch.
Thank God! I thought it was only me! I've been trying to find a slashdot setting that had suddenly changed to make this stop.
Guess what guys! I like to read slashdot at work. What I don't need if my laptop TELLING everyone I'm on slashdot in a creepy robot voice. (and yes I know I could mute the laptop)
THANKS! Didn't know I could do this.
Far better to simply start buying the $5 cree 60 w/$9 Br-30 65 w light bulbs from Home Depot and saving yourself some money.
In fact, with these being 1/6 of the watt of an incadescent (and 1/3 of a flourescent), along with a minimum 10 year guarentee, you would be better off jumping to these and allowing them to run a little bit longer.
With these ones other bulbs, it will be a waste of energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, this adds a lot of complex control circuitry to your lightbulb - a microcontroller ($0.50 will get you 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs, and there are probably ARM CPUs for under $1 by now), and some kind of radio or sound or light sensor for signalling (also no more than a few bucks), and a 1/N share of the cost of the remote control (which only needs to cost more than $5 because a $200 home automation system needs a fancy GUI and lots of user interface development.)
I might very well want to set different light bulbs in different rooms to different colors, to coordinate with the paint colors and the lighting needs of the various activities we use those rooms for. I'm not in their target market demographic, but having recently had to pick paint colors for my living room and seen how radically any color we tried changed depending on the lighting (direct/indirect sunlight, different kinds of incandescents, compact fluorescents, and cheap LEDs) and even depending on the color of adjacent walls/furniture - human color vision is an amazingly weird and twisty system - I can see that some people might very well want to have their lighting change its behaviour based on time of day.
On the other hand, I'm definitely in the target market for a cheap LED replacement for 150-watt incandescents, and for that matter for 100-watt; most of the cheap LED market is still for the 40-to-60-watt incandescent replacement.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you sell light bulbs, you'd rather make your profit on the part people are likely to replace soon than the part they don't change very often. People are much more willing to replace a light bulb themselves than a light fixture mounted on a wall (which might require an electrician in some places, might only get replaced during a decorating change such as repainting the bathroom, and which probably still works fine, as opposed to the old incandescent bulb that burned out.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's been a lot of research work on gigabit optical networking using LED lights yet we are calling this update of 1950s sensor light systems "smart".
Current cheap chinese-made LED lights are amazingly efficient and put out a very good light, but suffer from capacitor plague.
A solution for that has been developed at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan. Here's the theory paper: "Bridgeless SEPIC-derived LED Driver without Electrolytic Capacitor for Multistring Application". And here's the product announcement. "Dali Power recommends led drive design without electrolytic capacitor, used mainly for bulb lamp. Life is 10 times of the original LED drivers, the design life is as much as 40000 hours or more, can be well matched with the life LED lamp, small size, only forty percent of the original LED driver area. Products are mainly used in household low power lighting, suitable scope is 3W ~ 20W." So this problem is being solved. The new approach is both cheaper and has a longer lifetime.
If those overpriced "smart" bulbs still have electrolytics inside, they're already obsolete.
so you can switch them on and off without even reaching for the wall switch ;-)
http://www.engadget.com/2014/0...
Herve S.
They said CFL would last 7 years. Good luck having one last more than 2 years if it's used regularly. I replace my outside CFLs yearly. I don't, buy the garbage brand either so where am I going wrong? I also don't touch them with my hands unless I have gloves on (which is required for any type of bulb.
IMHO the older ones worked a lot longer than the new 'fancy' ones. I do not generally buy the cheap stuff w
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
CFLs are terrible for outdoor (cold location) use, and they're lousy anywhere they'll be turned on/off frequently. CFLs also have issues with failure if not mounted in the proper orientation they were designed for, or used in small fixtures that get hot.
LEDs have no such problems, and furthermore, the $10 Cree 60W equivalents come with a 10-year warranty from the manufacturer.
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